It seems to be the safe thing to do. There can be no doubt about the use of the 
text reminder then. 

If the practice are consistent in the way they notate it in the notes field for 
patient demographics (eg SMSOK at the start) I think we should still be able to 
use a query so that only consenting patients get sent the message & staff don't 
have to manually deal with every appointment entry. 

If the software has a tick box for this added later, it should then be possible 
to use a query to look for notes contains SMSOK and update the new field. 


Neil 
----- Original Message ----- 
From: Hugh Nelson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 
To: General Practice Computing Group Talk <[email protected]> 
Sent: Friday, November 24, 2006 2:48:16 PM GMT+1000 Australia/Sydney 
Subject: Re: [GPCG_TALK] SMS reminders and privacy concerns? 

I think that the Medical Record needs to document that the patient consents to 
SMS messaging. 
We obviously need to have that in the data structure in future. 


Neil McAliece wrote: Sorry this will be a cross post for some. I've jumped into 
a discussion on this in the Aust Div GP IM/IT policy list with this question. 

Would greatly appreciate opinions. 

What are people's thoughts on privacy & SMS? 

Eg a practice has raised concerns with this sort of scenario..... 

A teenage girl has provided a mobile number as a contact number. An SMS 
appointment reminder is sent but the phone belongs to her dad, or maybe her dad 
has borrowed it for a week. 

Maybe the reminder could be very general like. "Reminder- Appointment 
12/12/2006 " but even that might be enough for some parents to give the 
teenager a hard time about what sort of appointment they have. 

Do some practices have a method that they use in their appointment software to 
flag consent given for SMS reminders? 

Or do some take the approach that they inform every patient giving a mobile 
that in doing so they agree to SMS reminders on that number? 

This practice is using Medtech & I would like to investigate using the Medtech 
query builder to dump a patient list who have provided mobile numbers (rather 
than have someone go through the appointment book each day). 


Neil McAliece 
IM/IT Manager 
Murrumbidgee Division of General Practice 





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